Mobile information distribution systems are now widely used for business and personal applications. These systems allow mobile phone users to communicate with other mobile phones users, access Internet sites (e.g., online shopping and banking, ticket reservations or restaurant advice) and receive distributed messages (e.g., email or other short messages). With the explosive growth of these mobile systems, mobile systems have revolutionized the way businesses interact with their customers and with each other. This potential is evident in the rapid growth of mobile systems.
Today, some mobile systems provide limited messaging services. “Short Messaging Service” (SMS) is the transmission of short text messages to, and from, a mobile phone. Messages generally include a limited number of text characters and preclude images or graphics. To transmit a message to a mobile phone using SMS, a sender transmits a message to a mobile phone, using a Short Message Service Center (SMSC). The SMSC locates the mobile device and attempts a delivery by paging the mobile phone, and if the phone responds, the message is delivered. The SMSC may also receive a verification that the message was received by the mobile phone.
“I-mode™”, available from NTT DoCoMo, is another approach taken by mobile system providers to deliver information to mobile phones. I-mode provides multimedia services to mobile phone users, access to information (e.g., stock tickers, weather, traffic information) and communication services to communicate with other users (e.g., e-mail or a real time communications, such as instant messenger). I-mode incorporates technology, such as JAVA technology, into mobile phones.
Some mobile systems provide recommendations to mobile phone users. These recommendation systems may make generic recommendations to the users by sending messages (e-mail or SMS) to the user's mobile phone. The recommendation systems may base recommendations on various static attributes (also known as personalized filters) established in advance by the mobile phone user. For example, a personalized filter may filter information based on various interest categories (e.g., boating, computers, sports), profile data (e.g., older male) or location information (e.g., eastern United States, Washington D.C.). Collaborative filtering (CF) systems are a specific type of recommendation system that may recommend items to a user based on the characteristics of other users.
Multi-casting, i.e., the sending information from a single point to a select group of recipients, may be used for distributing information to a number of users. Only those groups participating in a multi-casting session actually receive the traffic for that group's session. For example, a video conference including multiple users may involve multi-casting since the user originating video and audio distributes the information to the multiple users one time. Without multi-casting, the same information will be carried over the network multiple times.
With the continuing proliferation of mobile communications there is an ever increasing demand to support additional services without necessitating a concomitant addition of wireless infrastructure to transport the new massage traffic. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method of providing additional services using existing facilities.